I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Apple's iPhone Is Now Worth More Than All Of Microsoft

This is an entirely stunning statistic: Apple‘s iPhone sales are now worth more than all of Microsoft:

One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion.

Now when we say “worth” there’s a number of different things that we can mean. One way would be to try and measure the stock market value of the iPhone against all of Microsoft for example. But this isn’t something easily done: sure, we could make attempts at it but we’d not get very close to a decent result. Too much of the value that we ascribe to Apple is of the entire ecosystem, including the company’s reputation for style, for us to really be able to pull out separate market valuations for a specific product.

We might also try looking at profits: we know what those are for Microsoft but pulling them out for the iPhone alone would be difficult. Partly the problem above, we’re absolutely certain that the iPhone makes more profits as an Apple product than it would if exactly the same item were being sold by anyone else. Partly also how it influences the whole Apple ecosystem: what portion of iTunes profits should be ascribed to the iPhone, what to the iPad, what to entirely other systems?

While it’s not really correct, for “worth” implies a stock value not a flow value, and sales is a flow not a stock, the easiest of the available numbers to use is just that: compare the sales. And as Vanity Fair notes, the value of sales of iPhones is now greater than the value of the entirety of Microsoft’s sales.

And the thing is, that’s not really the most remarkable thing about Apple’s recent achievements. The truly strange thing is that they’ve managed to gain this level of sales while making software style margins on selling hardware. That’s the trick that no one else is managing at all.

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Actually, smartphone know-how lies in *system* design and ecosystem vigor, “iPad Library Project.” And, in any case, contrary to you assertions Apple has its own–world-beating–chip designers. Once again, it’s real world performance, not spec sheets, that tell the tale.

Apart from the fact that the Tegra 3 has been demonstrated to be significantly slower than even the iPad 2 in the graphics department (see Anandtech benchmarks), you really have no idea that the general market has no nearest in speeds and feeds – they are interested in the end user experience where even with Jelly Bean, Android shows itself to be far less “buttery”-smooth than iOS in real world use.

Last quarter Samsung sold 37,000 tablets in the USA according to Samsung’s court filings. In contrast, Apple sold 2.5 million tablets in the same time frame.

You have no idea what you are talking about. You don’t make a world class, game changing internet communications device using specs. Your pointing to ‘hype’ only illustrates how utterly deluded you are. Windows user too, I’d guess. You haven’t a clue about Apple, from the sound of it.

It’s not hype, it’s money in the bank at this point. Your talking about some IRRELEVANT chipsets is what is HYPE.

The most important part in a smartphone or tablet is its brain – processor. nVidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core 12-GPU ARM processor has been on the market for almost one year but Apple’s own CPU development has been so slow that its dual-core 4-GPU A5X can’t compete all devices powered by nVidia’s Tegra 3 like Google Nexus 7 or later Microsoft’s Surface RT.

And more and more smartphones are using Tegra 3-like ARM processors, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S3 international version with Exynos 4 system of quad-core quad-GPU made by Samsung itself. And at the first two months of release, although Samsung may have faced a supply constraint, but its Galaxy S3 has stolen 10+ million users away from Apple, which bodes extremely bad for Apple’s iPhone.

And by the end of year, around 28 smartphones like the new HTC One X will be powered by nVidia’s Tegra 3 processor only and more tablets like Google Nexus 7 are coming to the global markets.

And another powerful competitor Qualcomm’s SnapDragon Pro quad-core processor has been officially released, which would no doubt have a very serious impact on Apple’s iPhone and iPad since these three quad-core ARM processors have in fact made Apple’s current New iPad and iPhone 4S obsolete in terms of fast computing power.

Millions of people have figured out one fact that devices powered by nVidia’s Tegra 3 have been so powerful as to dwarf iPhones and iPad in speediness. For example, playing games on Google Nexus 7 with Tegra 3 has been 2~4x faster than on Apple’s New iPad, thereby making games more challenging and exciting to play with.

Another reason why Apple is gradually losing its competitiveness is people would apparently favor large ~5″ screens than Apple iPhone 5′s 4″ small cheap screen. And Business Insider’s Henry Blodget has addressed this issue several times and got tons of resonances from around the world.

Because the perfect size for handheld gaming console is 6″ to fully replace SONY PSVITA and Nintendo 3DS, and there have been hundreds of millions of hardcore gamers in the world and Apple’s iPhone 5 with 4″ small screen and rumored iPad mini with 7.85″ screen have de facto left open this greatest market to competitors.

The Smartphone is typically a fad business and past fads like Palm, Motorola RAZR, RIMM Blackberry, Nokia’s phones all have faded out of fashion with some firms even on the brink of bankruptcy. If Apple iPhone 5′s screen were to be 4″, then Apple would miss a lot of opportunities.

- iEDU.me iPad Library Project Kids Reading 1000 App-Books A Year

Apple’s slow dual-core A5X has made the New iPad have a serious stuttering issue. When you download a large app or several apps at the same time, the New iPad got stuck in the middle of no where for several minutes, sometimes even half an hour. But Google Nexus 7 is so fast that it takes only a few seconds to download and install a 10MB app instantly. On the back server front, Google has much better technology and far wider bandwidth, I’re pretty sure.

Why ARM processor can’t host a deluxe Windows 8 is because its computing power is not powerful enough compared to Intel CPUs.

And most unfortunately, Apple has to sacrifice some important functions in their new iOS 6 to make its slow and even outdated hardware of iPads and iPhones work, which will no doubt drag down users experience sharply compared to Google New Android 4.1 powered by super fast Tegra 3 processor or full-blown Microsoft Windows 8 powered by Intel processors.

They had 150 Million in non-voting shares, this after STEALING CODE from Apple. All to promise to keep writing what is arguable one of their MOST profitable products (Mac Office). That shows what an 800lb gorilla MSFT USED to be.

We don’t know when they sold, exactly, but I hope I bought some of mine from them, LOL. They had to have sold around $50. I’m sure they made money on the deal, but talk about bad timing…

US$ 73.72 billion (2012) thats how much microsoft made in 2012. god damn it this article has no purpose, really purpose. where did they get a 17 billion sales number? oh god forbes is becoming a apple fanboy site :( I swear apple pays companies/websites form there 100 billions cash.